A little over a year ago, we packed up all our worldly possessions (again) and headed off to Switzerland before moving back to America. We said goodbye to our friends and rolled our suitcases down the street to the bus stop on an early morning in Tübingen.

And then we rode buses and trains to Engelberg, Switzerland, a familiar place we all love dearly.

It was pouring down rain when we arrived, and so we made our way up the hill to our friend’s house, where we took off wet clothes and breathed big sighs of relief.

Ben and Simon had just finished an entire year of German school. We would be headed back to the US in a couple of weeks to try and pick up where we left off in the summer of 2013, but for now, we would rest.

Everything else was far, far way except for this one thing:

Tomorrow there would be mountains to climb.

The next day was all blue sky and beautiful views.

We got up and wandered a few of our favorite nearby trails.

We returned to the abbey to buy the cheese that is made there.

We hiked high above the town on the little switchback trails that run behind the Swiss chalets.

We watched clouds roll across the sky.

For a week we rambled around Engelberg.

We went on long hikes in the morning and shorter wanders in the afternoon.

We sat around the house in the sunshine nursing our sore feet in the pool.

We found new trails and hiked old familiar ones.

We missed those who had been with us the last time we were in Engelberg.

And we enjoyed being together.

Just the other day, Simon said to me, “I miss walking in the forest.”

“Yes!” I said, “I miss it too.”

In the last year, we haven’t spent nearly the amount of time in the forest as we did in Europe.

So I dug out these pictures to remember our epic hikes in Switzerland.

I remembered how I love trailing behind my boys while they are running down a mountain.

I can feel their glee as they bound down a trail.

And I remembered how I love tea and treats after a long hike.

At the end of our first week in Switzerland, we did a large group hike up Mt. Titlis.

They had stations set up all along the way where we could fill up our water bottles with hot soup or tea, because it was super cold.

It was by far our hardest hike of the week, pushing me for sure to my limits.

The weather played chicken with us all day, and I was frequently ready to give in to it.

But then the sky would clear in places and the most amazing views would appear.

Sometimes the views below were just over the edge of some pretty harrowing clifftops.

But it was gorgeous.

The other hikers snaked above and below us. It was amazing to me that so many folks had come out for such a hard hike.

It was by far the highest I have hiked in Switzerland.

As part of the hike, we got to ride the gondola back down the mountain, saving my knees from the descent.

For our second week in Switzerland, we had friends from Scotland join us.

It’s always fun to share a favorite place with friends. Our boys had especially looked forward to the arrival of the Fitches, a family with three boys!

We took them first to maybe our favorite valley in all of Switzerland.

We hiked to a small hut for drinks and cake.

We had gorgeous weather for most of our time, with full views of all the mountains.

The next day we hiked up to the alpine lake above Engelberg.

Then we came down another gorgeous valley, a hike we did with all four of our kids in 2014.

On another day we took a gondola up to a mountaintop restaurant.

Just above the restaurant is the perfect spot for family photos!

Then we hiked back down to Engelberg after lunch.

We did one cloudy day hike in the lower hills of Engelberg.

This trail led us to a lower part of the river that runs out of Engelberg.

And then there’s a trail along the river that leads back up the valley, over a suspension bridge and back into town.

Taido and three of the boys managed to squeeze in a via ferrata one day that looked particularly harrowing.

Proud fellas.

For our final few days in Switzerland, we took the train to a different part of the country.

Lauterbrunnen.

We stayed in a hostel for just a couple of nights, so we could get in an epic hike before heading home to the US.

We started early in the morning. The boys are all pointing to the sign telling us how long it will take us to reach our destination, Kleine Scheidegg.

Higher and higher above Lauterbrunnen we climbed.

After a while, we started to get views between the clouds of Jungfrau, Monch and Eiger.

No matter how high you hike in Switzerland, there are little villages and huts.

And we crossed several times over where the trains climb up.

We constantly marvel at Swiss engineering while we hike around the country.

The temperatures dropped as we got closer to the tops of these mountains.

Finally we could see our destination, as well as the helicopters bringing tourists in and out. After lunch, we hiked down a different (and longer) way to another town (Grindelwald) before taking the train back to Lauterbrunnen. All in all we hiked well over 20 miles on our last day in Switzerland.

The next day we took the train to the airport and headed back to America with sore legs and loads of memories!

Goodbye Switzerland. And goodbye Europe!

The post Return to Switzerland appeared first on Alison Chino.

Well, my month of posting about Switzerland has come to an end, and next week I will be turning the page on the summer and begin sharing all the fun from my latest adventure of walking Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Trail with my friend, Diane.

But my memories of Switzerland would not be complete without these images of the gorgeous house where we stayed and its surroundings. We spent hours and hours enjoying this space, inside and out, and these photos will always conjure up for me memories of cool, calm mountain summer mornings and evenings.

I imagine that for many years to come, Engelberg will be the happy place I go to in my head when life gets too stressful. And in case I forget, I can always come back to these Snapshots of Engelberg to remember.

Peaches and oatmeal on the porch.

The pond out back.

And the way the sunshine made the trees sparkle in the water.

Sunny morning yoga on the tile patio.

Beautiful in the clouds.

And beautiful on blue sky days.

Walking to town.

Picnics in the park.

Going to the local abbey to buy cheese and bread.

Hearing the abbey bells.

And of course, the train station. The train whistle and the abbey bells kept time for us every day as the hours of summer slowly slipped by. Engelberg, I’m holding you close.

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I mentioned yesterday that we walked to and from the village of Engelberg several times every day. Sometimes we went for groceries and other times to the visitor center to use the WiFi.

Most days we walked through on our way to another hike in the area or to reach the local abbey to buy their freshly made cheese. But other days we wanted to play at the playground or go to the bakery. Whatever the reason, I was always up for a walk into town.

The walk to Engelberg always began at the top of this hill. On a clear day you could see the mountain that was called “The Rooster.”

Sometimes the Rooster was shrouded in clouds.

And sometimes it was hiding all together.

But then on some rainy days, you could still see the Rooster.

It was the same walk every day, but it always changed just a little bit.

In town we would walk under these banners, and run our errands.

We would walk past hotels.

And up to the abbey.

And maybe the train station.

On the way back up the hill we always passed my favorite yellow house.

The one with the cute little garage covered in tiny shingles and ivy.

I took a picture almost every time I walked by. Ben asked me why I kept taking pictures of it over and over again. The kids would run past it and on up the hill but I always stopped. I’ve never been that taken with houses actually. Trees and rocks and rivers are what usually stop me in my tracks, but there was something so enchanting about all the Swiss cottages and their flower window boxes. Talk about curb appeal!

All our walks to Engelberg ended up back here, in our own borrowed dreamy little Swiss chalet.

This was our 35th walk in my year of walking, and one of many  walks in Switzerland. Feel free to join in and walk with us for the rest of this year!

This week I am walking the epic Coast to Coast walk in England with my friend, Diane. Follow along on Instagram or Twitter.

The post A Walk in Engelberg {Switzerland} (34/48) appeared first on Alison Chino.

As I have been recapping my summer travels, you might have noticed that I skipped something when I went from Paris to our trip home through the Lake District.

I skipped about four weeks that we spent in Switzerland.

I have been saving it, holding it in my hands and heart like a precious gem, not sure how to share it.

This is the best way I know how to begin.

When we were planning to move to Scotland last year, I had a picture in my mind of what our new life would look like.

I had conjured a vague picture of a country house surrounded by stone walls and sheep. There might have even been a turret or two on the house, and I would walk just a short way down a lane to a little village.

In other moments, I was more reasonable and would conjure a cozy little flat above a bakery. Of course it would be around the corner from a flower market and across a cobblestone street from a cheese shop.

My head was full of images of the six of us walking to school and to the market and to the park. Only these images looked more like the opening scenes of Beauty and the Beast where Belle is dancing around her little provincial village and less like the gritty gray streets we actually walk.

To admit that I might have had a Disney cartoon picture of what our life would look like in Scotland is a little embarrassing, but it does reveal a bit about what color the sky is in the world inside my head.

And in Scotland we have had moments that actually do look like they came out of a Disney movie. More like Brave than Beauty and the Beast, but still, pretty spectacular moments. Sometimes we drive out to a castle and play and other days we go for a walk in the hills, and on those stolen Saturday afternoons outside of the city, Taido and I look at each other and remember that this is the good stuff.

For me, Aberdeenshire is what makes life in Aberdeen beautiful.

But the day to day life that we live in Scotland is not exactly what I had pictured.

In fact, I began to believe that what I had imagined was not real. It was just a pipe dream.

A silly girl’s fairy tale.

And then we went to Switzerland.

Where the whole country is like a page in a book from a fairy tale.

I know fairy tales mostly originated in Germany, but I think the idea for Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house must have come from a Swiss chalet.

All the different colored houses with curved, pointy rooftops and teeny tiny wooden slats layered together. And a bright flower box in every window.

It was love at first sight.

On the train ride from Lucerne to Basel, Whitney and I practically gave each other bruises hitting each other to “Look!”

“Oh my gosh! LOOK at that house.”

“Look at those mountains.”

“How can this even be real?”

We stepped off the train in Engelberg and walked down the street of the most adorable village. Past Swiss flag banners and hotels that could have been decorated with cupcake frosting. And all of it surrounded by 360 degrees of mountains.

Then we turned up a little lane to get to the house where we would stay for a month.

Away from granite buildings, school uniforms and constant internet, we read books, wandered the hills, played hours and hours of card games on an old wooden table and slowly chopped carrots and potatoes for soup.

We walked to the village twice a day, once to get our bread and vegetables for dinner and once to post pictures to Instagram. (Because though we appreciate not having it 24/7, we actually cannot survive without internet, apparently.)

We stayed long enough to learn a few customs, like the simple Swiss greeting that everyone cheerfully says in passing,

Gruetzi!

We discovered which brown bread we like the most. We became accustomed to the yellow signs that tell you where you’re walking in the hills. We figured out which cheese was our favorite from the abbey where they make it locally, and we fell in love with a certain bakery’s shortbread tart.

We were there long enough to notice details. The shape of shingles. The stacks of wood. The shop windows full of braided breads, backpacks, trekking poles and Swiss army knives. The meticulously kept gardens.

Taido has been telling me for a long time, since he first visited Engelberg over twenty years ago, that it is the most beautiful place in the world. But it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. Every single day, I would come upon some new view or the same one from a different angle and say, “I just cannot believe this place.”

But when I think about Engelberg now, while I remember its beauty, and I have thousands of pictures attempting to capture it, what I really hold onto from our days there were the sounds.

Mountain villages tend to be fairly quiet, and Engelberg was no exception, and perhaps it is because it was a quiet village that the sounds I did hear were so distinctive. The hourly noises of the abbey bells and the train whistle marked the moments of the days passing, and the cowbells were the music to which we wandered. And all of these sounds were accompanied by the running fountain on the pond behind the house where we stayed. If you took a chair out by the pond and sat for a while with a book, eventually you would hear all four of these sweet sounds.

On our last week in town, I walked around recording these noises of Engelberg, because I will forever associate them with an almost perfect sense of peace. I wanted to take them home to play them on a stressful day, so I could listen hard, take deep breaths and remember that such a places exists.

Otherwise, I might be tempted to think I dreamed it up.

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